The Re-Emergent Church

Theorizing While I Research...

Sep 26, 2022

A Dialectical Movement

In my last episode of the Logia Fragments podcast,1 I discussed the similarities that exist between Rosaria Butterfield’s notion of “radically ordinary hospitality” and that of the feminist theologians. My goal was, as I said, to show that Butterfield’s notion of hospitality is no different than that of the liberal, anti-Christian, postmodernist, and feminist theologians. Not only are the concepts practically identical, they are also delivered via narrative and not discursive argumentation. The significance of this is simple —The social justice movement, as an outgrowth of postmodern philosophy, identifies discursive reason as a cultural construct given the place of privilege in Western civilization by White, European males, and uses narratives/stories in order to make its points. Put another way, this is significant because it shows us that Butterfield’s message, content, ideas, and manner of argumentation (i.e. narrative) are in close alignment with that of the postmodernist and feminist theologians I’ve cited in the last podcast, as well as in my little critical booklet.

This should be enough for the discerning reader to reject Butterfield’s notion of hospitality for what it is, social justice ethics disguised as “loving your neighbor as yourself.” Yet there is still an inability of many professing Christians to see what is actually going on, or an inability to come to grips with the fact that they have been bamboozled. I’ve puzzled over this in an attempt to not just give an easy answer that may be true, but which may likewise not help us protect ourselves against this kind of deception happening in our own congregations.

And here is where I currently stand on the matter: The current progressivization of the professedly evangelical and Reformed churches is something that has been taking place for a long time but went under the radar as churches dealt with the apparently bigger threat of the so-called Emergent Church movement in the late 90s and early 2000s. What we are seeing is the Re-Emergent Church movement. It is a softened version of the Emergent Church movement, replete with postmodern and feminist concepts, social justice ethical imperatives, and communitarianism, but lacking the original movement’s explicit rejections of key orthodox tenets of the faith and the doctrines they, by logical necessity, imply.

The Emergent Church movement was never destroyed. It was simply given a bath, a shave and a suit, and a name tag that read:

“Hello, my name is ‘Reformed Evangelical.’”

Let me try to explain.

1. Problem

While researching for my series of articles on Carl R. Trueman, I came across a piece in which he talked a little about the Emergent Church movement. It was something that I found problematic, but which I didn’t give too much thought to until I recently began digging into The Gospel Comes With a House Key again. That’s when the pieces started to fall into place.

Here is the quote from Trueman —

Now, there has been much hoo-hah over recent years about how the church in general, and evangelicalism in particular, must embrace many aspects of the (nebulous) cultural conditions called postmodernism. In part this is built upon a historiography which I shall presently call into serious question. First, however, I want to draw attention to the fact that the proponents of postmodern or post-conservative evangelicalism generally consider themselves to be saying something new. They are calling, as they see it, for a fundamental recasting or revisioning of evangelical theology in postmodern, anti-Enlightenment categories.
[…]
Now, when one approaches the major texts of postmodern evangelicalism and asks what they are saying, the answer is exciting: they claim they are opening up radical new directions for theology; but when one approaches the same texts and asks what they are doing, the answer is somewhat more prosaic. Far from pointing to new ways of doing theology, these texts are on the whole appropriating an admittedly new idiom, that of postmodernism, in order to accomplish a very traditional and time-honored task: they are articulating a doctrinally minimal, antimetaphysical ‘‘mere Christianity.’’
[…]
Any historian worth his salt can see that this ‘‘mere Christianity’’ agenda has a well-established pedigree in Christendom. At the time of the Reformation, Erasmus, writing against Luther, used a combination of Renaissance skepticism, intellectual elitism, and contemporary Catholic teaching on church authority to argue for a Christianity which was essentially practical in orientation and minimally doctrinal in content. In seventeenth-century England, Richard Baxter adopted a linguistic philosophy suggestively akin to that of his contemporary Thomas Hobbes in order to undercut the traditional metaphysical basis of Christian orthodoxy and offer a minimal account of the doctrines of the faith. In the early nineteenth century, Friedrich Schleiermacher responded to Kant’s critical philosophy by fusing pietism, Romanticism, and a post-Kantian antimetaphysical bent to reconstruct Christian doctrines as statements about religious psychology, not transcendent theological truths. And evangelicalism, from its roots in revivalism and pietism, through its development in the pragmatic, anti-speculative culture of America, to its current existence as a more-or-less amorphous, transdenominational coalition, has historically embodied in its very essence an antipathy to precise and comprehensive doctrinal statement.
[…]
Therefore, it would seem at least arguable from the perspective of history that the evangelical appropriation of certain aspects of postmodernism is not really a radical break with the past. It might simply be a co-opting of the latest cultural idiom to give trendy and plausible expression to a well-established and traditional ideal of ‘‘mere Christianity.’’
[...]
What is disturbing is that the advocates of postmodern mere Christianity are not debating how much one must believe to be saved; they are actually proposing a manifesto for the life of the church as a whole, a somewhat more comprehensive and ambitious project. It is the validity of this that I question.
[…]
In my admittedly limited experience it does not really seem to be the case that postmodern evangelicals want to engage with the truly radical philosophical implications of the various postmodern philosophies; it is rather that evangelicals are drawn to the idiom of postmodernism because it facilitates a hip, trendy, and culturally plausible in-house defense of the classic, established evangelical notion of a mere Christianity.2

Given that the Emergent Church movement was very active during this time in undermining the Christian faith as a whole, leading Christians into places of deep spiritual darkness and confusion, one would think that Trueman’s concern would be for the well-being of the church, especially the young men and women who were being targeted by it.

But instead of doing this, Trueman argues against the way in which these rank heretics were trying to achieve a form of mere Christianity that would unite Christians from diverse theological backgrounds. He downplays the substance of their heretical theologies, treating the Emergent Church movement heretics as if they were children only pretending to stab passersby with plastic swords, and not actually maiming and killing them. Trueman states this rather clearly, writing —

Postmodern evangelicalism, like much of postmodernism, presents itself to the world with all the smug self-importance of a radical revolution. Yet this is an illusion, because the end result at which it aims is as old as the hills, as exclusively doctrinaire as it can be, and as traditional and conservative as it comes: an old-hat, mere Christianity, articulated in a contemporary cultural idiom which actually renders it utterly powerless to challenge the dominant culture and yet impervious to criticism.3

The problem with the Emergent Church movement, in other words, was that it was an unsophisticated, heavy-handed, and scatterbrained movement that could not achieve its goal of formulating some notion of a mere Christianity.

2. Reaction

The reaction to postmodernist “Christianity,” by implication, was overblown. Discernment ministries which were pouring themselves out on a daily basis, confronting and refuting the movement’s biggest names — Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle, and Richard Rohr — and seeking to minister to babes in Christ who had no grasp of what these new teachings were or how they should respond to the EC movement, well these ministries were simply overreacting. The EC movement, according to Trueman, was opposing some of the very things which “we” Reformed and evangelicals also oppose. So the problem was not that the EC movement opposed the Enlightenment’s focus on the autonomy of the individual, the primacy of reason, and capitalism (all of which were derived from the teachings of the Protestant Reformation itself). Not at all. Rather, the problem, according to Trueman, was that the proponents of the EC movement, as well as their scattered — albeit theologically sound — critics were all over the place.

3. Solution

The postmodern “Christians” of the EC movement, according to Trueman, further undergird his argument by bristling at those of us who are confessionally Reformed. As he puts it —

The problem, I suspect, is rather that Reformed Orthodoxy is, well, orthodox, that it offers a fairly detailed and extensive account of the Christian faith which stands in clear opposition to the traditional mere Christianity which evangelicals have co-opted the idiom of postmodernism to help them express. 4

We see here a synthesis between two completely opposed views. Trueman presents the EC movement and its critics as having one main fault in common — they are not bound by a shared, precise, and ecclesiastically enforced confession of faith. The solution, then, is Reformed Orthodoxy, by which he means Reformed theology mediated via the theological lineage of Abraham Kuyper.

It is this form of Reformed Orthodoxy which does not embrace the rationalism, individualism, and capitalism of the Enlightenment. It is this form of Reformed Orthodoxy, then, which can actually make an impact on the culture (unlike the scatterbrained postmodern “Christianity” of the EC movement). Thus, it is this form of Reformed Orthodoxy which the students under his care at Westminster would find to be in their best interest.

Some Concluding Remarks

The Neo-Calvinism of Kuyper and, therefore, of Trueman does not stress the autonomy of the individual, individualism, the free market, capitalism over and against the teachings of the Emergent Church. As I’ve stated elsewhere, this is a Christianity that is anti-individualistic, socialistic, and communitarian.5 It is an anti-Christian Christianity that has more in common with G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and the World Economic Forum than it does with anything even remotely biblical, which is steadily pushing along the Re-Emergent Church movement. It is Emergent theology that has been given a bath, a shave, a fresh set of clothing and a name tag that reads: